The very juxtaposition of certain terms – Muslim, women, travel, writing, global – can raise questions in our contemporary moment. These may relate to practices of veiling and modesty, the need for male guardians, or, perhaps if we dig a little deeper, the difficulties when faced with restricted access to halal foods. Many of these suppositions about gendered mobilities are grounded in colonial or Orientalist notions about Muslim women and their life worlds that can remain alive and well in the present. Without specialist access to the archival record, it can be too easy to assume that Muslim women do not have a history as global travelers – and, if by any chance they do, that they have not had the facility to write about their experience in decades and centuries past.

This presentation will begin by introducing a book collaboration that, in making that history more accessible, belies some assumptions, even as it affirms and inflects others: Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (edited with Daniel Majchrowicz and Sunil Sharma, 2022). It recovers, translates, annotates and contextualizes a diverse array of travel writings produced by Muslim women in ten different languages over three centuries. The authors are diverse, taking in queens, reformers, pilgrims, Sufis, wives, converts, captives, flâneurs, litterateurs, and provocateurs, as they crisscrossed the globe from the seventeenth century to the advent of the ‘jet age’ in the mid-twentieth century.

Join us in listening to Prof. Siobhan Lambert-Hurley share their research on how South Asian Muslim women employed food in their travel writings to differentiate between themselves and others at different historical moments and locations.

Introduction by Prof. Roberta Micallef